According to the great Christian theologians, like Augustine and Aquinas, the most difficult to understand issue in the whole Christian story (why we needed Christ’s redemption) was dumbed down so that the people of the day, nomadic Israelites, could understand it.

This is an extremely profound thought. Think about it. We have been convicted of the worst crime ever, and sentenced to a terrible eternal punishment, but it is too difficult to explain to us what it was so we must be satisfied with the Looney Tunes version. How could our all powerful, loving God be put in such a position that he had to subject his only son to terrible agony and death? There was apparently no other option. Who (or What) could impose such a requirement on Him? There must be a powerful exogenous force being exerted on Him? Some say no not an external force, this is simply his nature: He is so fundamentally good that this is the only way that the stain of his creation of humanity can be erased.

The cold war with the Soviet Union ended more than one score and three years ago, and since then we have been staggering (largely unsuccessfully) through a number of civil wars and peace keeping missions, none of which directly impacted on the safety of the USA. What will come next? I think we should look not to the Middle East, but to the Western Pacific.

Current policy on the “containment of China” seems to be leading to a new cold or hot war in the Pacific Region. The basic idea is that Chinese economic and military expansion in that region is a threat to the USA that must be stopped.
New bases are being found, and fleets are being deployed to demonstrate that the USA will not stand for China assuming a position as a major power in that hemisphere.

The furor over the torture of terror suspects by USA military and officials has died down, and all the identified perpetrators have escaped punishment, despite the fact that some of the victims were tortured to death. Does this mean that we have crossed the threshold and that these techniques are now routinely acceptable?

I for one am extremely disappointed that our current chief, who is so fond of using the term brought to justice to describe killing, using drones, or special forces, suspects that he cannot arrest, and bystanders, has been unable to bring Americans, who he can arrest because they are serving in his military and civil service, to justice for serious crimes for which there is plenty of evidence. To make things worse he allowed Ali Mussa Daqduq who tortured to death 5 US soldiers to receive justice from an Iraqi court , which freed him

While artificial intelligence has not yet turned out the way science fiction predicted, machine learning systems are definitely working all around us. Many of them aren’t necessarily complex, but they do adapt output based on internal algorithms, learned parameters and external stimulus. Most folks understand a learning system can be corrupted by feeding poor input but the practice of doing so is not so trivial. Some German researchers have developed a proof of concept to ‘poison’ a learning system given some knowledge of the learning vectors (seed data, algorithm, etc.). The impact of their research revealed less about whether poisoning could be done and more about revealing the magnitude by which proper poisoning can sway a system. It wouldn’t be far fetched for a financial institution’s high frequency trading system to become the target of a poisoning attack – one only needs to make it alter its behavior in the slightest of predictable ways to completely cash out on its actions.

People just love to know secrets. Using the pen name Mark Owen, the author was a Navy SEAL on the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. No Easy Day has already become an Amazon best seller before its release date and promises to detail the mission despite the author’s statements to preserve national security. The Department of Defense was initially unaware of the former SEAL’s book and requested an advance copy to screen for potential security risks. In that first screening, the Pentagon’s general counsel is already threatening legal action for disclosures of sensitive information. (Too bad they can’t do that to loose-lipped politicians …) The book spans more than simply the raid on bin Laden’s compound and walks the reader through the author’s own growth in the military through special operations training and missions.

I think we are very committed to being able to take Kentucky students and put them on a report card beside students across the nation. We’re simply saying to the ACT people we don’t want what is a theory to be taught as a fact in such a way it may damage students’ ability to do critical thinking.

I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, that’s completely inconsistent with the world we observe, that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it. Because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future.

It amazes me that the vast majority of educated Americans don’t know what it means to be healthy. They think if they keep their waistline, heart rate and cholesterol numbers in check, then they’re good to go.

Wrong.

Health is complex

Health is complex. To illustrate, think of the following items and jot down if you think they’re good or bad for your health … or if it depends. Really, take it like a quiz.

Can the USA make laws that bind non Americans living in other countries?

Julian Assange, an Australian living in London, and founder of Wikileaks, greatly embarrassed and offended the USA by publishing sensitive dioplomatic documents that had been given to him (and other media) by a US serviceman.

Clearly the serviceman broke a US law, making him liable to prosecution. Call him well meaning, whistleblower. naive, or a fool, but he was a sergeant and so should have known better than to breach the trust placed in him by his country.

Can anyone explain to me how Assange can be held accountable to US law. As a non citizen of the USA, he had no representation in the legislature that made publishing that information an offence for Americans in its jurisdiction. How can that domestic censorship law now be applied to a non citizen who at the time of the alleged crime was living in another country far outside of the jurisdiction of the USA?

Increased data storage density, retrieval speed and archival accuracy is always a huge IT problem as the volumes of information produced by business, science and academia continue to expand. Half a decade ago, the data demands were already somewhat enormous and growing exponentially. The Harvard Medical School in Boston recently made a breakthrough on the data storage front using DNA. Everyone always talks of the sheer capacity DNA has for storing massive amounts of information densely, however, the manifestation of using DNA for data storage has never come to fruition. Obviously, living organisms have little use for arbitrary data in their DNA and were actually killed by it. Furthermore, if the organisms lived, the natural process of genetic mutation would corrupt the data over time. Synthetic biologist George Church got around the hurdle by storing DNA fragments on the surface of a glass chip, all indexed and cross referenced against one another to ultimately store a genetics textbook as proof of concept. Other researchers utilize genetic watermarks, akin to digital ECC, in order to detect and prevent data mutation.

Have you ever wanted to talk to the bastards who pay people to drop those inane spam comments on our Omninerd web site?

The comments are usually a totally irrelevant and meaningless statement from an anonymous who knows nothing about some subject thread that has been dormant for a long time. They always include a hyper-link to a commercial web site, and the parasites are paid for the hits generated.

Perhaps you don’t see many of these contributions. If that is so it is because many of the regulars on this site are empowered to delete them.

With the collapse of mainstream commercial print and electronic media, the advertising industry is desperate for ways to target commercials and it would like to fuck up any and all internet discussion forums and social or professional web sites with this crap.

Recent reports call out the silent presence of a Russian Akula class submarine in the Gulf of Mexico as a failure of American national defenses. The matter naturally adds fuel to the running Internet memes that Vladimir Putin is among the most bad-ass of all Russians. In reality, the activity is nothing new per se, the Russians and Americans have parked submarines near each others coasts or flown sorties across each others land masses for decades. The proximity of this particular Akula class submarine and the duration for which it went undetected sets it apart from the others. American officials commented, “The Akula was built for one reason and one reason only: To kill U.S. Navy ballistic missile submarines and their crews. It’s a very stealthy boat so it can sneak around and avoid detection and hope to get past any protective screen a boomer might have in place.”